Death in the House

by Anthony Berkeley

  ‘You must find that out from Isabel herself, sir,’ Lord Arthur smiled back. ‘I’m not saying anything that might weaken my entreaty that you’ll give up the idea and let me do the job.’

  The Prime Minister shook his head. ‘Don’t waste your time, Arthur. My mind’s quite made up.’

  ‘Well, don’t be in too much of a hurry, sir,’ Lord Arthur urged. ‘If I may suggest it, there’s one course which I think you might follow without any loss of prestige to the Government. A most reasonable course, in fact.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  Lord Arthur thought for a moment. ‘You probably know, sir, that Dickson is thinking of moving an adjournment on Monday, for the purpose of discussing the deaths of Lord Wellacombe and Middleton. It’s certainly a definite matter of urgent public importance, and I think there’s a good deal to be-said for the view that it would be right for the House to discuss it before the Bill is proceeded with. Well, sir, why not postpone your speech until after the discussion? I’m sure Dickson would like a division, and you could treat it as a vote of confidence. You’d get the opinion of the House, at any rate.’

  The Prime Minister smiled more broadly. ‘Arthur, I have an idea you’re being rather subtle. Let’s see what might happen. First of all I don’t doubt that Dickson would get his quorum. The discussion would then be shelved till half-past seven, and would probably last the whole evening. That, of course, would mean postponing the Bill until Tuesday. Well, there’s no particular harm in that, but… what about the division? I’m really very doubtful as to how we should come off, in a vote of confidence on this particular issue. A great many of our own people would vote against us, of that I’m sure; some out of the highest motives, such as saving my valuable life (for which I hope I should be grateful), and some out of sheer cold feet.

  ‘And supposing the vote went against us? I should have to resign. But I’m quite certain that Dickson wouldn’t care about forming a Government at the present juncture. In fact I should say that he’d care about it so little that he’d be quite willing for a certain proportion of his own men to vote against him and for us, just to ensure that he didn’t carry his own motion. However, if a win was forced on him and he found himself compelled to form a Government, of course he’d drop this bill like a red-hot coal; and that, I imagine, is the last thing he’d want to take the responsibility for doing. He knows as well as I do that without this Bill it’s just a toss-up whether India remains in the Empire another fortnight. If she walked out, the responsibility would be his and his party’s. They wouldn’t live it down for a generation. It would be the biggest set-back the Labour Party has ever had: far worse than the General Strike. No, it’s one thing for Dickson and his friends to use their thunder against the Bill so long as we’re bringing it in, but quite another matter to live up to their own words when the responsibility’s their own. Their front bench know all this as well as we do; so I think we can safely say that if it came to a vote of confidence, we should get it, malgré our own discontents.

  ‘But what about the discussion itself? Do you really consider it advisable? I’m afraid I don’t agree. Some very unfortunate things would certainly be said. A still more unfortunate impression would be left, not only in India itself but on the Continent: that over a matter of being masters in our own house, we are divided amongst ourselves. In point of fact that is exactly the impression I am so anxious to avoid. We must at any rate present to the world the appearance of being firmly determined to stand no nonsense. Terroristic methods must not even seem to perturb us. If we let it be seen that we are rattled, then goodbye to everything that this country has ever stood for in the councils of the world.

  ‘And that, my dear Arthur,’ concluded the Prime Minister, with another smile, ‘is why I’ve already given Dickson quite plainly to understand that if he insists on moving the adjournment after questions on Monday, I shall do all I can to prevent it. And between ourselves, Arthur, I rather fancy that the adjournment will not be moved.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lord Arthur, a little blankly. ‘I see.’

  The Prime Minister continued to regard him for a few moments with benevolence. Then he said mildly:

  ‘Well, if that’s all you wanted to see me about, Arthur…?’

  Lord Arthur took the hint.

  As he closed the door of the library behind him he glanced at his watch. The time was twenty-five minutes past six. He had better get back to his flat and see about changing for dinner, early though it was. There was nothing more he could do here, and the idea of a Club, and the anxious questioning of men whom he either knew too well or did not want to know at all, was repugnant. Perhaps half an hour’s rest would not be amiss. Now he came to realise it, he felt all in. There was that seating-plan of the House yesterday afternoon to pore over too, and a few more blanks to fill in.

  In the street, however, he remembered the cable he had promised to send off about Lacy. There did not seem quite so much point in it now, but it had better be done. Wearily Lord Arthur turned his steps in the direction of the India Office.

  There were signs of activity about it, he was glad to see. For one thing the porter was on duty, which was unusual at that time on a Saturday in any Government office. Refusing the man’s offer of the lift, Lord Arthur walked up the stairs to his own office on the first floor. Scarcely had he sat down at his desk when the door burst open and a young man tumbled in.

  ‘Who the hell…?’ began the young man, and then blushed vividly. ‘Oh, it’s you, sir. I’m awfully sorry, sir. I’m on duty, you see, and hearing someone come into your room…’

  Lord Arthur smiled. The young man’s face was vaguely familiar, and his youthful exuberance was refreshing. During his term at the India Office Lord Arthur had been brought into contact with few but the more elderly of the permanent officials; and an elderly Civil Servant is a dull stick. It seemed sad that this bouncing, tow-haired young man would one day be an elderly stick himself. But he would. Bureaucracy would get him down, as it got down all the rest.

  ‘That was very alert of you,’ Lord Arthur said. ‘No, come in. I want to learn what arrangements have been made. Let’s see… I’ve forgotten your name for the minute.’

  ‘Farly, sir,’ replied the young man, blushing again, but this time with pleasure. He went on to explain that orders had been given for one junior member of the First Division staff to be permanently on duty; a camp-bed had been set up in the Secretary of State’s own room for him to sleep on at night. He was to take all incoming telephone calls and deal with all matters as they arose; he was to keep in touch with Sir Everard Johns, and if possible with Lord Arthur himself.

  ‘Just as well you told me, because no one else has,’ Lord Arthur commented, dryly. It was, he thought, fairly typical that he, the nominally responsible head of the Office, should be the last person to be informed of the emergency arrangements. Sir Everard Johns, the Permanent Under-Secretary, had always made it plain that he considered any Secretary of State a bit of a nuisance and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary little more than a cypher.

  Lord Arthur questioned the young man further. Farly told him that the police were not only guarding the place strongly outside, but had men posted throughout the building as well.

  ‘I had a talk with one of them just now. They’re expecting an attempt to blow us up,’ said the young man, hopefully. ‘Do you think there’s any chance of it, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lord Arthur said. The idea seemed ridiculous. But why? The Terrorists had blown up plenty of buildings in India. It was quite right of the police to take precautions, but… ‘I shouldn’t think it was very likely,’ he added, with a smile.

  ‘Oh, don’t you think so, sir?’ Farly said, in a disappointed voice. He seemed to have welcomed the idea of being blown up.

  There were one or two papers lying on the desk, and Lord Arthur took them up.

  ‘No, don’t go, Farly,’ he said, as the young man turned towards the door. ‘I’ve got a job of work for yo
u in a minute, but I’ll just see whether there’s anything to deal with here first.’

  He glanced rapidly through the papers. One contained statistics concerning the sterility of oxen in the province of Genkhan; the other was a report of the dismissal from his post of the ticket-clerk at Baipoul station for getting drunk and assaulting the station-master with an automatic machine.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘Sir,’ burst out young Farly, ‘is it true that the Prime Minister is going to speak on the Bill on Monday?’

  Lord Arthur looked at him sharply. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’ Farly looked taken aback. ‘It’s all round the Office. Everyone was saying so this morning.’

  ‘I see. Well, there’s no truth in it. It isn’t decided yet who is to speak, or when. So you can put that all round the Office too.’

  The young man mumbled something contrite and looked at Lord Arthur like a puppy that has been whipped for another puppy’s misdemeanour.

  ‘That’s all right, Farly,’ Lord Arthur said, more kindly. ‘I’m glad to have known. These silly rumours cause a lot of harm. You can make it your special duty to report any others you hear to me personally, at once.’

  Farly brightened, and Lord Arthur went on to give him instructions concerning the cable.

  As he was doing so, the telephone bell rang. Lord Arthur answered the call himself, and the voice of the porter informed him that a messenger from Scotland Yard was waiting with a document and instructions to put it in the hands of Lord Arthur himself.

  ‘Send him up.’ Lord Arthur turned to Farly. ‘There’s a man coming up with a report of some sort from Scotland Yard for me. You can sign for it. I want to go up to the registry. I suppose there’s someone on duty there?’

  Young Farly thought that there would probably be a clerk on duty, and offered to go himself.

  ‘No,’ said Lord Arthur. ‘You get that cable off right away.’

  They left the room together, Farly to turn into the Secretary’s room next door, Lord Arthur to walk a few steps down the corridor and push the button for the electric lift; for the registry containing the files of all the Office’s documents was on the top floor. As he stepped into the lift he heard the porter conducting Scotland Yard’s messenger up the stairs below and just caught a glimpse of two men in the blue and gilt of the State service. The lift shot up.

  There was a clerk on duty in the registry, and he was very anxious to oblige Lord Arthur; but ten minutes’ search of the files could produce no such thing as a report on the journey of Mr Reginald Lacy to India during the previous summer. Leaving the clerk to investigate further, Lord Arthur made his way downstairs.

  As he was walking along the corridor of the floor on which the registry was located, he heard what sounded like a faint pop far down the stairs. Instantly a man jumped out of a doorway just ahead and hurried down the stairs. Somewhat surprised, Lord Arthur hurried after him. It was, he surmised, one of Lesley’s men and the pop had obviously alarmed him.

  There was the sound of other feet on the stairs, and Lord Arthur’s alarm grew. It was to be justified. Scarcely had he descended a couple of flights, with the broad back of the Scotland Yard man a flight ahead, when a dull boom sounded three or four floors below and the concrete step under Lord Arthur’s feet perceptibly trembled.

  ‘By Heaven!’ he thought. ‘They’ve done it.’

  They had.

  When at last Lord Arthur reached the floor that he had left only a bare twelve minutes earlier, it was to find his room a mass of splintered wreckage and half a dozen plain-clothes men already busy about the body of young Farly who lay, a bullet through his head, across the threshold of the door.

  chapter sixteen

  Agitation of a Home Secretary

  ‘Well, we’ve got the man at all events.’ Sir Hubert Lesley spoke with grim satisfaction. He seemed to attach much more importance to that fact than to the dead body of young Farly.

  Lord Arthur had taken it for granted that the man would have escaped and had been far too much occupied during the last ten minutes in seeing to the disposal of the body and examining the wreckage of his room to bestow more than a passing thought on the perpetrator. He looked round eagerly.

  ‘You’ve got him?’

  Sir Hubert nodded. ‘My men outside caught him making off. He must have mistimed his bomb. Another three minutes, and he’d have been clear away.’

  ‘I doubt if he mistimed it, sir,’ respectfully suggested the Superintendent who had arrived with Sir Hubert. ‘Our men were on to him as soon as he fired at Mr Farly. He must have set the fuse for almost instantaneous explosion and then run for it, hoping for the best.’

  ‘It was the fellow who said he was a messenger from Scotland Yard?’ Lord Arthur asked.

  The grimness of the Commissioner’s expression deepened. ‘It was. He walked right past the noses of my prize idiots outside. There’ll be a word or two coming to them later. As if anyone couldn’t get hold of a Government porter’s uniform!’

  ‘He’s English?’

  ‘Not he. He’s an Indian. Light enough to deceive anyone at a few yards, I grant you, but the porter downstairs should have spotted him. Young Farly probably did, and that’s why he got shot. Well, it’ll be like old times to me. And if,’ added the Commissioner, ominously, ‘I don’t get something out of him, I shall be very much disappointed.’

  Lord Arthur forbore to inquire into the methods by which the Commissioner proposed to obtain his information. After all, it was the Prime Minister’s life, in a way, against this man’s silence; and squeamish though we are in our treatment of the unconvicted thug, squeamishness would be out of place now.

  ‘What do you think happened, Lesley?’ he asked.

  The Commissioner pulled at his chin. ‘Well, I think it’s fairly clear. This fellow told the porter downstairs that he had an important message from me to you, to be delivered to you personally. You tell me that you gave Farly instructions to sign for it. The man probably told Farly that he would wait for you; that would account for the ten minutes’ delay. Then Farly must have got restive, or spotted him, and may have been about to give the alarm; so the fellow shot him, chucked his bomb into your room, and legged it.

  ‘Curiously enough,’ added the Commissioner, ‘we had a warning a couple of hours ago that there might be some sort of an attempt to blow this place up. I’ve had it under guard, naturally, after what’s been happening in India; I rather suspected they might try the same sort of thing here. But it was funny we should get a warning.’

  ‘Whom from?’

  ‘God knows. Anonymous call, from a telephone box in Ludgate Circus. Asked for one of the Detective Chief Inspectors – not me or any of the Superintendents. My man says he’s pretty sure it was an English voice, but speaking as if he had a hot potato in his mouth; meaning that he was trying to disguise it. Cultured, but so low he could hardly hear it. All he said was that there was going to be an attempt this evening to blow up the India Office and this fellow thought we ought to know about it. Then he rang off. Curious, very.’

  ‘Ludgate Circus?’ Lord Arthur repeated, thoughtfully. ‘That doesn’t help you at all?’

  ‘Not much, would it? We had a man at the call-box within three minutes, but there was nothing to be seen. After all, Ludgate Circus is one of the busiest spots in London. No doubt that’s why it was chosen. Well, so far as their main object was concerned, they drew a blank. I suppose from Farly’s manner the fellow guessed you were in your room, and Farly wouldn’t let him in to you. Obviously they followed you here.’

  ‘But I only came round by chance,’ Lord Arthur objected.

  ‘Suited their book all right. Two birds with one stone. By the way, I’ve detailed a couple of men to escort you out of here wherever you want to go; and they’ll wait outside while you’re there. Keat will tell you who they are. Give them a list of your movements. Where are you dining?’

 
‘At No. 10.’

  ‘Good. You’ll come under the ordinary guard there. That will set you two free for a couple of hours for something else.

  ‘We’re short-handed enough as it is,’ grumbled the Commissioner.

  An uneasy, cold feeling began to make itself felt in the region of Lord Arthur’s spine. ‘But why all this?’ he protested.

  The Commissioner looked at him pityingly. ‘Well, my dear fellow, what do you imagine that fellow who shot Farly was really after?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Why, you,’ said the Commissioner, and turned on his heel.

  Lord Arthur stared at the little knot of detectives clustered in his room, at the doctor busy with Farly’s body on the couch, at the detective-constables who passed him with brisk tread on their various errands bent. It seemed to him that all returned his gaze with looks of pity and apprehension. Did they really think that he was next on the assassins’ list?

  ‘Good God!’ muttered Lord Arthur with feeling.

  It was in a curious mood that he returned to Whitehall Court with the two plain-clothes men on his heels: part uneasiness, part bravado, and part exhilaration. The feeling of danger was bracing; the sensation that the danger might take the form of a shot in the back was not so pleasant. Lord Arthur did not try to hide his relief as the friendly portal of Whitehall Court received him safe and sound. The bravado had forbidden him to take a taxi – but he was glad when the walk was over.

  Near the entrance to the Court a newsman was bawling his wares.

  ‘Attempt to blow up the India Office,’ he intoned, amplifying the more laconic wording of the placard, ‘Bomb Explosion in Whitehall.’

  Lord Arthur’s wonderment found expression in a question to the man as he stopped to buy a copy of the newspaper.

  ‘How long have these papers been on sale?’

  “Bout five minutes after the bomb bust, guv’nor,’ the man grinned. ‘Tuppence, it is.’

  Lord Arthur glanced at the paper in his hand and saw that it was not an evening newspaper, but a copy of The Sunday Record.